The decline, or at least the stationary character, of the population may thus be shown to be partly the result of a cause at once social and economic; for this particular social evil was the result of the economic experiment of the extended use of slavery as a means of production. This extension was itself partly the result of the accidents of war and conquest, and in fact, throughout this picture of the change which was passing over Italy, we can never free ourselves from the spectres of militarism and hegemony. But an investigation of the more purely economic aspects of the industrial life of the period affords a clear revelation of the fact that the effects of war and conquest were merely the foundation, accidentally presented, of a new method of production, which was the result of deliberate design and to some extent of a conscious imitation of systems which had in turn built up the colossal wealth, and assisted the political decay, of older civilisations with which Rome was now brought into contact. The new ideal was that of the large plantation or _latifundium_ supervised by skilled overseers, worked by gangs of slaves with carefully differentiated duties, guided by scientific rules which the hoary experience of Asia and Carthage had devised, but, in unskilled Roman hands, perhaps directed with a reckless energy that, keeping in view the vast and speedy returns which could only be given by richer soils than that of Italy, was as exhaustive of the capacities of the land as it was prodigal of the human energy that was so cheaply acquired and so wastefully employed. The East, Carthage and Sicily had been the successive homes of this system, and the Punic ideal reached Rome just at the moment when the tendency of the free peasantry to quit their holdings as unprofitable, or to sell them to pay their debts, opened the way for the organisation of husbandry on the grand Carthaginian model.[184] The opportunity was naturally seized with the utmost eagerness by men whose wants were increasing, whose incomes must be made to keep pace with these wants, and whose wealth must inevitably be dependent mainly on the produce of the soil. Yet we have no warrant for accusing the members of the Roman nobility of a deliberate plan of campaign stimulated by conscious greed and selfishness. For a time they may not have known what they were doing. Land was falling in and they bought it up; domains belonging to the State were so unworked as to be falling into the condition of rank jungle and pestilent morass. They cleared and improved this land with a view to their own profit and the profit of the State. Free labour was unattainable or, when attained, embarrassing. They therefore bought their labour in the cheapest market, this market being the product of the wars and slave-raids of the time. They acted, in fact, as every enlightened capitalist would act under similar circumstances. It seemed an age of the revival of agriculture, not of its decay. The official